


Estelio Han Estelio Veleth

by LayALioness



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 22:53:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11931018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: “Elin,” a voice calls, and she is already smiling before she looks up, because she knows exactly who it is, even if his voice is deeper.He has aged, and Arwen knew that men aged but it’s so much different, seeing it this close. He has a new name, and a beard, and he’s grown taller and broader though he is still quite lean.But he is still just as bright-faced and hopeful, with the same soft eyes, and he will always be Estel to her.





	Estelio Han Estelio Veleth

**Author's Note:**

> I'm binge watching the lord of the rings extended editions so here's this thing about one of the og otps.  
> Title from "Evenstar" in the original Sindarin.  
> Also I know that /technically/ in (book) canon, Aragorn and Arwen don't meet let alone fall in love until Aragorn is 20 but uh, I call bullshit considering he was literally her dad's adopted ward since he was 2. They totally grew up together and Aragorn was 100% in love with Arwen his whole dumb life and no one can convince me otherwise.

Arwen falls in love when she is just ten years old, with the gardens of her father’s home. She likes the smells and the flowers and brushing her hand against the petals’ silk-soft flesh.

But autumn comes to Rivendell and with it, the gardens wilt, and the flowers fall dead at her feet until she cries under the withering trees.

“ _Galad_ ,” her mother says, wiping the tears from Arwen’s cheeks like they pain her. “Why are you sad?”

“I do not want them to die,” Arwen says, cradling what is left of her first love; half-hearted blooms crumbling in her hands.

“Ah,” Celebrian hums, a melodic sympathy. “What a tragedy it is, to love what does not last. How fortunate that you and I will live forever.”

 _But what good is living_ , Arwen thinks,  _if it causes this much pain?_

Her brothers bring her yellow flowers from Lothlórien, which do not die even as they rest on her window sill for many years, but it is not the same. She knows now, what loss tastes like, and so she is not the same, either.

Arwen falls in love again when she is two hundred, in the midst of adolescence, heart overflowing with a song she cannot name. She is in Lórien with her mother and her mother’s mother, and her grandmother’s guard Eregwen.

Eregwen is silver-haired with stern eyes that feel like frost on Arwen’s skin whenever they catch her. She is tall and strong and can shoot three arrows one through the other in the time it takes to blink. 

“She is also old enough to be your grandmother,” Elladan laughs, plucking a golden apple from the tree above their heads.

“Or great-grandmother,” Elrohir adds, always quick to join in teasing her.

Arwen glares at them both. “What do you two know about love, anyway?” Her brothers have had no great loves of their own, more interested in things like war and glory, fingers inching towards their swords even in their sleep.

When she confesses her love to Eregwen and gives her the bracelet she’s made from a lock of her hair, a token of her affection, the guard accepts it, as graceful and stoic as always, and her refusal is not unkind. 

And when Eregwen dies later that same decade in a skirmish with some orcs, Arwen weeps bitterly into her bed sheets though she hasn’t thought of the guard in some years.

Even immortal things are unsafe, she’s learning. There is no soft place to rest her love so that it may not break.

Arwen falls in and out of love enough times in her life to lose track. For she has such a very long life, and time is a difficult thing for immortals to keep track of. It moves differently for them, sometimes stretching languidly in a century that feels like one honey-sweet summer, and sometimes falling over itself in a jumbled up rush. 

She is closer to three thousand years old than not by the time she meets the boy called Hope, the false son her father brought home to Rivendell for safe-keeping, as if he was some rich trinket rather than a child. 

Estel is seven years old when he meets her, and of course Arwen has heard of him, quick fond mentions in her brothers’ letters, between talks of weather to avoid talks of war. But her brothers do not write very often, and Arwen has let time run over her in Lórien, like water over stone. She is surprised to see the seasons have changed. 

She finds the boy sitting in the gardens she loved best as a child, in almost the exact same spot. She kneels down so they are at a level, and she studies the flower he’s cupping gingerly with both hands.

“It’s beautiful,” she offers, and he blinks up at her, all soft gray eyes, and it has been so long since she’s seen someone so young and bright and hopeful, still in the early spring of his life.

“I do not want it to die,” he says, and she smiles, can’t help it, can’t help the affection that swells up in her heart.

“Not everything lasts,” she tells him, “and so sometimes it’s best to just enjoy the time you have together before it’s time to say goodbye.”

Arwen spends the next few years in quick succession, almost always with Estel. She indulges him in all things, and he is easy to indulge, interested in the world around him but above all, he is kind. He likes to take her hand when she goes quiet, and lead her through Rivendell as if on a quest. He fancies himself an elf,  _like you,_   _elin_ _!_  and her own personal knight, beyond that.

Everyone find it hilarious, of course; little Estel tugging the immortal evenstar along wherever he goes. The princess of Rivendell doting on a human boy, more so even than his birth mother.

Arwen hums a lullaby, stroking Estel’s hair while he lays half sprawled on top of her as she reads. He’s mostly asleep but still clinging stubbornly to consciousness the way children sometimes do.

“I’ll never love anyone better than you,  _elin_ ,” he sighs, and Arwen hugs him a little closer.

Her father calls for her soon after that. 

“I am worried,” he says, grave, as he often is. Arwen cannot picture her father without a frown anchoring the corners of his mouth. Caring so much has made him hard, shaping him like stone. “I know you care for him, as do I, but he is still mortal and we both know you have a tendency to grow overly attached to things that do not last.”

He does not mean to be callous, she knows, but his words still sow a bitter seed inside her, all the more because he’s right. When will she be allowed to keep what she loves? 

She goes back to Lórien the next morning. 

Time passes strangely in her grandmother’s forest, so that Arwen blinks and ten years go by, and time sees her back at Rivendell. 

“ _Elin_ ,” a voice calls, and she is already smiling before she looks up, because she knows exactly who it is, even if his voice is deeper.

He has aged, and Arwen  _knew_  that men aged but it’s so much different, seeing it this close. He has a new name, and a beard, and he’s grown taller and broader though he is still quite lean. 

But he is still just as bright-faced and hopeful, with the same soft eyes, and he will always be Estel to her.

They have written, a little, in their time apart. He’s sent her what he’s learned of Sindarin and Quenya, and she’s sent scraps of old songs that her mother used to sing her. It isn’t enough that Arwen feels like she knows everything that she’s missed, but it is enough that they are not strangers, it is enough for them to fall into step with each other once again.

Aragorn is now twenty, still young for his race, and now he flushes whenever she smiles at him, and he looks away when she touches his arm. Arwen remembers this age, remembers Eregwen, and she turns him down gently, satisfied that, as with her adolescent love for the guard, Aragorn’s own crush will pass and they will fall back into the relationship they had before.

He decides to go study with the rangers in the north, to travel the world, uninterested in his birthright, and Arwen meets him in their garden to say goodbye.

“Will you miss me?” she asks, teasing, but Aragorn is serious when he says “More than anyone.”

Arwen expected to miss him, but she didn’t expect to miss him quite so  _much_. She did not expect to feel the absence of him like a bruise, a subtle ache to remind her that it’s there. 

They still write, between his battles in Gondor and Rohan, her trips to Lórien and Rivendell. It is not often, and it is not enough, but it is something. In his letters, she sees him grow up. His thoughts change from lofty and innocent to weary and contemplative. He sends her poetry that he manages to read in his spare time, lines that he says remind him of her, words that make her cry for no reason at all other than how much she loves them. He tells her about what he’s learning from the rangers; which herbs can heal poisoned wounds and which ones can kill from one chew. 

He writes  _I know you probably know all of this already, but some of us do not have an eternity to study._ and she laughs so hard she cries, and then she sobs because  _it just isn’t fair_ , that she should love someone this much, when his life is so fleeting.

Because it is,  _it is_. There is no life as fleeting as a man’s, not even a flower’s or a firefly’s, because men practically run out looking for their deaths. Whether by sword or poisonous herb or fever, men prove themselves breakable over and over again. Arwen only has one death, which she can take or leave at her leisure, but Aragorn has  _hundreds_. He’d might as well be made of the same paper as all his letters.

She keeps all his letters anyway, just like those undying yellow flowers, preserved in the hope that her heart might stay intact too.

He writes  _Sometimes I look up at the night sky and search for you. I can find Valacirca, Telamundil, Menelmacar, but not the evenstar. There is no star in the whole sky bright as you._ Arwen reads that letter so many times that the ink grows almost too faded to read, but it does not matter. She’s memorized the words by then.

Arwen is in Lothlórien, under the golden coppice, when she sees Aragorn again.

“Lady Lúthien!” 

He is grinning when she whirls around to find him somehow even taller and broader than he’d been last. He’s in the tail-end of his summer now, and even if he turns his back on his lineage, there is a kingliness in the way that he stands and moves and breathes.

“Have you forgotten my name so quickly?” she asks, breathless for no reason at all beyond just the sight of him.

“Forgive me, my lady,” he says, stepping forward until they are nearly touching. “You walk in her likeness.”

Arwen smiles because it has been years and battles and losses but this, this is familiar. Estel has always been able to make her smile. “So many have said.” Lúthien, who gave up immortality because she fell in love with a man. Arwen studies Aragorn, taking note of each change, adjusting the picture of him in her head. She does not realize he is doing the same until he shakes his head, rueful.

“You have not changed at all.”

Arwen reaches up, brushes the hair from his eyes. His skin is so hot it nearly burns her. “You have.”

He looks at her as if she is the pool and he is the stag, ready to drink from her. “You cannot know how much I have missed you.”

“I can,” she tells him, and he takes her hand. “I do.”

Arwen knew she loved Aragorn, she’s loved him since she first saw him, but she didn’t know that love would change, that it would grow and expand until he was in the shadow of her every thought. She didn’t know love could feel like  _this_ : that walking side by side under the spring-gold canopy in warm silence would be enough. That him stroking the skin over her pulse would make her gasp. That his touch would make her feel like she’s swallowed sunlight. 

She looks at him and she thinks  _oh_. He makes her feel  _young_  again. He makes her feel temporary. He makes her feel like she has an ending, and it’s worth everything leading up to it.

Aragorn can spend the season with her, but there are wars to be won and thrones to be taken back and worlds to save. She kisses him in her grandmother’s garden, and when she pulls away, he laughs.

“Your father told me that I wasn’t allowed to marry you.”

“When was this?”

He flushes, which somehow endears her more. “The year I turned twenty, and you came back to Rivendell.”

“I remember that day,” Arwen says, pressing her fingers to the line of his jaw. “You could hardly me in the eye.”

“I thought I had walked into a dream,” he says. “I had been dreaming of you for years. I could not tell if you were real, at first.”

“I imagine my father was rather convincing,” Arwen muses. “Does this mean you won’t marry me?”

“I have wanted to marry you since I was seven,” Aragorn says, rough pad of his thumb against the smooth hollow of her cheek. “I would marry you tomorrow, if you’d have me.”

“We can wait until the war is over,” Arwen smiles, and he kisses her again and again and again. He might have never stopped, if her brothers hadn’t interrupted.

They write less often than they used to, each of them busy doing what they can to save Middle Earth. Arwen loses more and more friends, to sword or ship, and Aragorn grows even more world-weary. 

 _I feel like I could sleep for a hundred years and it would not be enough_ , he writes.

She writes back  _I slept for a hundred years once. When I woke, I did not feel rested at all._

She writes  _I dream of sleeping with you. I dream of waking with your heartbeat right under my ear, so I know that you’re safe. Come back to me._

He sends her the ring that his mother gave him, which he wore on a chain round his neck.  _For safe-keeping._

She sews him a banner and makes her brothers deliver it.  _For your next victory._

Arwen dreams of Aragorn constantly; sometimes they are the same age and sometimes not. Sometimes he is a king and sometimes he is a corpse. Sometimes she dreams of a little boy with his gray eyes and pointed ears and she wakes up filled with love for a son she does not have. It is hard to tell what is prophesy and what is wishful thinking.

Sometimes she thinks she's seen everything this life will give to her. A wedding in Gondor, with Aragorn wearing his father's crown. A son. A daughter. Two daughters. Three. Peace, and discord. Happiness, and grief. But more than anything, overwhelmingly, love. Love filling her life to the brink, and then passed it, overflowing. Aragorn, pale and dead on a dais while Arwen mourns by his side. Death, inevitable in a way that has never felt real until now, and still she does not fear it.

 _It will all be worth it_ , she thinks _, everything, anything, for one life with him. One life with love._

"I don't want you to grow old and feel like you made the wrong choice," Aragorn admits one day, his face buried in the crook of her shoulder, beard tickling her skin. 

"There is no choice," Arwen tells him. "I love you. I have loved you since I've known you, and I will love you until the end."

They meet, more often than not, in the middle. She finds him in the forest, while looking for plants to aid fevers, and they have a few hours together before he has to reunite with his soldiers, and she has to return home.

He catches her on her way to Rivendell. They tie up their horses and swim in the stream. He tugs at her ankle, cool and slick, and when they kiss he tastes like the water, like he could just wash her away.

She goes to speak with her father after that, so he can see that she’s made up her mind.

“This is really your choice?” he asks one last time, and Arwen shakes her head, because this is the part that no one really understands.

“There is no choice,” she says. “I love him. I love him. That is all there is.”

**Author's Note:**

> "Galad" is Sindarin for "brilliance/starlight" but it's used here as a term of endearment.  
> "Elin" is Sindarin for "star" and is Aragorn's childhood nickname for Arwen because "evenstar" is kind of a lot for a kid, especially in elvish.


End file.
